


We'll Be Alright

by rawrr



Category: Figure Skating RPF, Olympics RPF, Scott Moir/Tessa Virtue Fandom
Genre: F/M, Fluff and Angst, post-Sochi
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-03-07
Updated: 2018-03-12
Packaged: 2019-03-28 02:18:56
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,926
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13894161
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rawrr/pseuds/rawrr
Summary: The music starts, and to the strains of the piano melody, she shifts on top of him. There’s an inherent familiarity to this, to looking into his eyes, always dark when she’s here, always dark when he’s looking at her. It’s the fiery dark she always sees, the hazel everyone else claims to see so elusive, she’s half-convinced it’s a myth, a trick of the camera.The ice is cold but she is not.Tessa & Scott||From Sochi to Pyeongchang to now.





	1. all along it was a fever

**Author's Note:**

> This is my first fanfic ever. I've had this in the back of my mind since they came back (since the reality show if I'm really honest). Finally getting around to posting it. This is not really based on anything that actually happened. It's just that Tessa and Scott and their beautiful hot mess of a co-dependent dynamic makes for great conflict and storytelling and I'm all about that. I have no idea how rpf works, but I do write original fiction, so I'm thinking of Tessa and Scott as characters that I write. I hope it's in character, based on everything we know, but it's all interpretation, right? Forgive me for not understanding any of these dynamics.

“I love you,” he whispers to her back. The cold bites where her bare skin touches the last of Sochi’s Olympic ice. The opening notes of Stay have yet to thrum through the Iceberg. In the hush of the crowd, the words in his voice—uncharacteristically raspy, some might say, but she knows better—settle over her like a cloak.

The ice is cold but she is not.

The music starts, and to the strains of the piano melody, she shifts on top of him. There’s an inherent familiarity to this, to looking into his eyes, always dark when she’s _here_ , always dark when he’s looking at her. It’s the fiery dark she always sees, the hazel everyone else claims to see so elusive, she’s half-convinced it’s a myth, a trick of the camera.

“No matter what,” she whispers back, as she falls to the side, digs her nails into the ice to stop herself from pressing a hand to his face, to the nape of his neck. They’re characters in a play. She isn’t Tessa and he isn’t Scott, they don’t commit to other people only to betray them in empty locker rooms, dressing rooms, hotel rooms, in his bed, in her bed.  

 _All along it was a fever_ , Scott sings over Rihanna.

Scott’s fingertips ghost over the bare skin of her spine. Tessa shivers.

Their truths might’ve been sewn into those lyrics, she thinks.

 

* * *

 

 

He has wings on his back when they step past everyone and their hugs and pitying congratulations, to an unoccupied corner draped in shadows, like they’ve always done. He leans against the concrete wall, pulls her into him with an arm around her waist and a hand pressed to her nape, his fingers tangled in her curled and sprayed hair. She clutches the light fabric of his dress shirt, one hand at his hip, the other over his heart. She squeezes her eyes shut, feels the thrum in his chest and pretends it’s for her and not just for the three and a half minutes they were allowed to be more.

He kisses her first, a brush of gossamer wings over her lips. It’s gentle and slow and so, _so_ out of character for this part of their partnership that it takes her for a loop, her vision blurring. Her fingers tighten in their grip. He kisses her again, hard and biting, the kind of kiss she prefers. He pulls back and they’re both breathing hard, forehead to forehead, noses brushing.  

“The Olympics are over, Scotty.” Her words brush against his mouth. “Time for you to go home now. Time for _us_ to go home.” 

“And then what?”

If she didn’t know better, she could believe that he sounded a little lost. But this was Scott Moir. Life after they stopped being a _we_ , being an _and_ , had always been waiting for him. The final reward for sixteen years of hard work.

X marks the spot.

“Press play,” she pulls away, “Find something else to do. A hobby, maybe.”

What she doesn’t say: separately.

What she does: “Cassandra’s probably waiting for you.”

It takes a herculean amount of strength to pull herself away. Phantom pain bites at her shins. Corporeal pain tears at her heart. But she’d prepared herself for this, braced herself for this. She’d practiced this dance as hard as she had Malagueña and Carmen and everything in between—not Seasons, not that paltry excuse of a love story, that joke of a dance Marina had forced down their throats because it was what everyone had wanted.

(For them to lose.)

She’d fucked him in the catacombs of the Budweiser Gardens, a wound up temptress angry at the ISU, at Skate Canada for denying them what should’ve been theirs, furious at Scott for his fingers carving bruises in her upper thighs, for the unnecessary brushes of skate blade-scarred fingers at her nape, the small of her back, places where he knew she _was_. She’d fucked him and then stopped, gone cold turkey as she’d watched him go back with Cassandra, foolish Cassandra cheering for them in the stands while he carved his name over every part of Tessa's body. She’d put on wedding dresses for him, she’d sat at his kitchen table with his mother, looking through the pictures in Today’s Bride with misty eyes, looking up at Tessa with a wistful sort of heartbreak.

She’d watched Scott shove the magazines out of sight, like they were a dirty little secret. “Cassandra will be here soon,” by way of explanation.

She’d fallen out of sync with him, she’d faltered a twizzle. She’d fucked him in her twin bed at Canada House to get it back. She’d fucked him after their loss with vodka souring their breath, their silver medals shoved out of sight, beneath the creaking beds, where neither of them could see.

She’d seen Cassandra’s name flash on the screen of his blackberry, telling him he won in her heart. She’d turned away.

This time, she has Ryan. This time, she's not in pain. This time, her steps aren't measured. This time, she lifts herself, she doesn't lean on him.

This time, she has reached her end.


	2. something in the way you move makes me feel like i can't live without you

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I stress wrote to avoid a midterm. Oops. But writing makes me feel like I've got control, so here we are.

“I’ve been looking at houses in London,” Cassandra says, the day after they return. It’s early yet, the dust has yet to settle. Scott is still raw from the reporters with their mics that they’d shoved into his teeth, as if it’d make his future, his failures, his fucked-up he-still-doesn’t-know-what with Tessa clearer somehow.

“For us. You know, now that you’re retired.”

There’s printouts of real estate listings scattered all over her dining table, black print on white paper interrupted by glossy multi-coloured brochures. She has a realtor who wants to discuss options as soon as possible, get an offer out by the end of next week. Scott has never been one for motion sickness, but his head spins, his stomach churns.

“We’ll start with a three-bedroom, then upscale according to the number of kids we end up having.”

At least two—she’s been reminding him at every turn, enough that he hears it, remembers it even while he spaces out, her voice blurring into white noise.

He grips the edge of his chair, as if it might anchor him, but his anchor is a living, breathing human being, and though she’s conspicuously present in every conversation, every interaction he has with Cassandra, she’s not there. She’s not there, and sometimes, when he thinks about her not being there for the rest of his seventy-odd years, there are hands around his throat.

There’s a simple answer to his problem: tell Cassandra no. That he’s not ready to buy a house, that thinking about committing and setting down roots not centred around Tessa makes the blood rush to his head, makes his world spin, his vision darken, and he’s twenty-one, alone in Canton and drifting all over again. He’s twenty-six years old and the only commitment he’s ever made has been to Tessa, and that can’t count because there had been no decision to make. It was-is-has been yes or no, and he can’t just go from having to decide between holding Tessa’s hand and not, when he could never not hold onto her, to picking a house, a career for life _after_.

“I had sex with Tessa,” he announces, blurts out, his mouth running away from his mind. His mind knows there’s no good to be accomplished by blurting out the dirty little secret that’d ruined his last months as one-half of Tessa and Scott. It’s why he’d guarded his secret so closely, as jealously as he’d guarded Tessa. But his body, his goddamn mouth needs to run.

Cassandra turns to stone. She’d been standing over her coffee pot, her back to him, but now her shoulders have gone rigid, her hands curled into fists at her side. Silence stretches, Scott’s insides twist into knots.

“In Canton?” she asks quietly, and he can see her wish to forgive in the way she turns around slowly, picking at her nails. He wishes Igor hadn’t drilled body language and posture and speech with limbs and nothing else into his brain, because now that he reads, he can’t un-see. It makes him feel—crueller, somehow.

“Yeah,” he says, and he watches the tension in her body unravel, sees the line of her shoulders start to soften, and— “But also at Canada House. In Sochi.”

Her face crumples, her anger, her grief etched into the red tip of her nose, the bite of her teeth on the inside of her cheek. And it’s here, in the heart on Cassandra’s sleeve, so jarringly different from Tessa and her fastidious self-control, that he finally sees what Cara and Charlie had been laughing about, ever since he’d introduced them.

 _Take that bullshit to your discount Tessa Virtue_ , Cara had snapped at him once. He hadn’t been drunk but their weekly summer cookout had been washed out and everything had been the _worst_. The Leafs had fallen out of playoff contention, the Jays had been setting themselves up to lose, and Danny’s beer fridge had been broken so his choices had been piss-warm beer or none at all. Insult to injury: _Cara_ of all people had slaughtered him at NHL ’12.

Tessa had been in Ottawa that weekend.

Cassandra had stopped gushing about Cara after that. 

“Everyone told me I was a fool when I started dating you. An even bigger fool for letting myself fall for you,” she shakes her head. “But I thought they just…didn’t know you.”

“It was Tessa…” he swallows.

Tessa in a low cut dress and fishnet tights, legs wrapped around him over and over again for hours each day. The ridges of her spine against her soft skin, all the way down her back, exposed in his— _her_ favourite black leotard. Her eyes darkening to a richer green when he’d caught her looking at him. Her mouth, pink and swollen where she’d bitten at her lips in concentration through their short dance no-touch.

Cassandra swipes angrily at her eyes. “Get out.”

It’s the end, and not a beginning, and he should be grieving. But the weight on his chest is gone as he walks away, and all he can think is—

_Tessa._

 

* * *

 

 

It’s hard to have enough clothes to warrant a post-break up pick-up when half of his wardrobe is tucked into Tessa’s pyjama drawers. Old short sleeved tees, new full sleeved shirts that droop over her shoulders when she wears them, the ends of the arms hanging over her knuckles. She has his hoodies, his Skate Canada fleeces. His long socks, even.

He tries to call Cassandra once—because it’s normal. To ask if she’s seen his team Canada boxers, but he knows she probably hasn’t, so it’s for the best that she doesn’t pick up. For over a year, he’d called her his girlfriend. He’d skipped parties and events with Tessa to drive across the border to see her, she’d occupied the back of his mind _before_ and _after_ —

Though not during, and that had been the root of the problem, hadn’t it? That he’d remembered her and followed Tessa into the change room anyway, that he’d remembered when the haze had cleared, had felt guilt twisting him up inside when she’d called him later that night. But the guilt had never been enough to clear that haze, cure his need for the _during_. Tessa had been _Tessa_ , and Cassandra had been far away. Cassandra had been right there, had crossed the Atlantic to come cheer him on, and Tessa had still been _Tessa_.

So, the breakup is all at once clean and a mess. He doesn’t plan on seeing Cassandra again, and he can breathe again, because there’re no more houses to buy, no more reminders that he had betrayed everything his mother had raised him to be.

It’s a relief to be in the moral right again.

(It’s misbegotten. He’s disgusted with himself.)

 

* * *

 

 

Tessa disappears for a weekend, to Toronto says Jordan, to Kingston says Cara. To Ottawa, says neither of them, but she’s got stubble scrapes reddening her neck when she meets him at the empty Ilderton Arena on Monday morning for practice, and he’s always been horrible at math, but even he can add two and two.

Four: there’s bruises on the insides of her thighs that don’t match his fingers.

She wears the gauzy blue Worlds rendition of her Umbrellas of Cherbourg dress, with no tights under her thigh warmers. She gets warm in the routine first half hour of stroking and crossovers, and the woollen caterpillars that she loves and he hates comes off. Except, then he catches a glimpse of the bruises trailing up and up and _up_ , and then he’d much rather she’d kept them on.  

“I found it in my parents’ basement,” she says, holding out the edge of the flimsy skirt. “Isn’t it funny that it still fits?”

It’s not funny at all.

“How was Ottawa?” he bites out. And it’s a dare as much as anything else. For her to tell him otherwise. To look him in the eye and lie, when she hadn’t even bothered with getting her alibi straight.

It’s hope. That she hasn’t gone back to Ryan Fucking Semple for the fourth time in as many years.

“It was good. Really good to get away from it all, you know? Ryan thought we were great, by the way. He says you should be proud of yourself.”

Foolish hope.

“How’s Cassandra?” she asks, nonchalance in the way she nudges his shoulder with hers. But Tessa Virtue isn’t as good an actress as everyone makes her out to be. Her limbs are loose, her muscles are relaxed, but there’s a tick in her temples, a tightening of her lips, an edge to her voice when she says _Cassandra_.

For a split second, he considers lying to her. He thinks about her and Ryan and her in his bed at Canada House and then turning around and going to fucking Ottawa for Ryan Fucking Semple. He thinks of his dishevelled pride. But their partnership has been built on lies to everyone but each other, and even if it’s coming to an end, he just—can’t.

“We broke up.”

Old habits die hard.

“Oh,” she says softly. It hits him like a punch to the gut. “Do you…want to talk about it?”

He shakes his head. “Nothing to talk about.”

They workshop Into the Mystic instead, choreographing spins and turns and rotational lifts to thrums of the Van Morrison’s bass. He holds her waist, holds her tight, holds her safe. And when his fingers linger on her bare skin, when he grips her thighs tighter than he perhaps should, neither of them says a word.

 

* * *

 

 

There’s a week and a half between Sochi’s close and Art on Ice’s start.

That’s a week and a half to pack up ten years of their life, a week and a half to create a brand new program on a once-familiar rink. His mom offers them ice time readily, and they work alone without an audience, in pin-drop silence punctuated by the glide of their blades and their breathy voices. There’re no coaches at the boards, only Jordan’s old video camera set up on a tripod, and he’s more at ease than he had been for the entirety of their last season with Marina watching over their shoulders.

Their training agreement with Arctic Edge is finished. Into the Mystic is still rough around the edges, but it’s _something_ —more than Seasons, but he’s not thinking about that. It’s late afternoon on their second Wednesday since their silver. They’ve finished skating for the day, so Tessa stands with her shoulder touching his, leaning against the boards, empty water bottle dangling from her fingertips.

 “We should go back,” she says quietly, “There’s two weeks left on our leases.”

Her cheeks are flushed from exertion, but her fingers are icy when he takes her hand. It’s a spot of familiarity in a storm of change. He might suffocate if he lets go. She squeezes his hand, and he hears as clearly as he would if she’d put her voice to it.

_We’ll be alright._

He’s not ferrying her back and forth between the Ilderton Arena and her parents’ house in London anymore. Tessa tells him she’ll see him tomorrow, bright and early, she says with a grimace. She’s got her own car now, she relies on only herself. Not even him, or perhaps, especially not him.

She lets go, snapping on her skate guards, pushing the door open and walking away without a second glance. And Scott, stupid, _stupid_ Scott is left alone in an empty rink, staring at his empty hand to the echo of the closing door.

It’s a bright and early next morning, but he turns down the highway to the first bar he can find in London. The Fireside has happy hour going in full swing, stuffed full of people who cheer his gold, call his silver a win. Half the bar wants to buy him a drink. The other half wants pictures. He’s loved and celebrated and with his empty stomach full of beer, he can laugh and it doesn’t sound hollow. When they ask where Tessa is, he doesn’t sound bitter as he says:

“Oh, you know Tessa. Always busy.”

He chugs beer until the only thing he can remember is how it had felt to hold her hand.

 

**Author's Note:**

> Apologies in advance.Thanks for sticking with me!


End file.
